In the personal computer software market, there have long been four main areas of software development: word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and graphic design/drawing. More recently, there has been a proliferation of offerings in three other areas:
1. groupware, a category of software designed to help people work together, of which Lotus Development Corporation's Notes.RTM. package is an example, PA1 2. personal information managers (PIM's), which help people organize their schedules, appointments, lists of things to do, etc., and PA1 3. diagramming tools, such as flowcharting packages. PA1 1. Project teams, formed to conceive and implement process improvements, become overly concerned with the use of the improvement/management tools available to them, and lose sight of long-term objectives. PA1 2. Meeting agendas and minutes, as well as progress reports, create heavy paperwork burdens. PA1 3. Data collected about processes are often incomplete or flawed, and analysis is, therefore, prone to error. PA1 4. Many standard quality improvement tools are very tedious when used manually.
The expansion of software development activity indicates an ongoing endeavor to harness the power of the computer to help people work more effectively and efficiently, both as individuals and as team members. This endeavor is spurred not only by economic necessity, but by advances in the theory of organization management. Management experts indicate that as much as 50% of the work performed in organizations is unnecessary. Many case studies demonstrate that this waste can be cut dramatically by using modern total quality management (TQM), process reengineering, and strategic planning methods.
These methods typically require the cooperation of several people from various departments within an organization; in many cases a formal team is organized specifically to improve a work process or solve a problem. The work of problem-solving or process improvement generally benefits from a systematic approach, involving a cycle or cycles of diagramming processes, analyzing root causes, seeking creative solutions, choosing promising ideas, testing them, collecting and analyzing data, and instituting the changes that work best.
In many ways, this systematic approach to work improvement is derived from the scientific method described by Francis Bacon, and later by John Dewey. The modern theorists who have had the most influence on this type of work have been W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran. Deming and Juran have propounded detailed cycles of systematic effort to improve processes, but organizations have tended to modify their suggestions to suit their own needs, leading to a multiplicity of methods which are in active use in all sectors of the economy.
However, organizations which employ these methodologies encounter a fairly consistent set of constraints or problems, including the following
A number of software developers supply software packages designed to reduce or eliminate one or more of these constraints. However, none of these software packages provides thorough utility to overcome the constraints listed above.
As common in all projects requiring the use of several distinct software tools, project organization is lacking. For example, it is very difficult for the project team to keep track of the overall project during its progression. Moreover, organizing work files becomes a daunting task when several or numerous members of a project team must access several software tools.
It is, therefore, very desirable to develop a project organization and optimization tool that provides thorough utility to support quality improvement activities. More generally, it is desirable to develop a project organization and optimization tool for use in projects including one or more process steps involving the use of one or more specific, executable software tools.